Evercool Fan, Silverstone LC04, Powercolor 9550 and More

Good evening, welcome back to HotHardware :) Before I begin serving up the juice tonight, I want to take a second and abuse my front page privileges. I know, I know, such a rebel I am ;) I would like to personally congratulate both Marco, and his lovely fiance on getting engaged. I have been working with BigW. for almost three years now, and from what I know, Adrienne and himself make a wonderful couple. I hope everything in your lives that you seek, come true. Congratulations, I wish you the best!

"Evercool boasts some fairly impressive specs on this fan. Including a 32.4CFM with only <25dBa of noise. I couldn't even hear the fan running over the background noise of my computer, even with all the non-essential fans turned off. The outer case on this fan is actually made of solid aluminum, and in certain instances can actually act as its own heatsink."

"As you might have already known, an HTPC case has always been considered as a pricy product. Sometimes the price is outrageous despite their quality, and the people who were enthusiastic about these kinds of cases were usually AV maniacs. You can easily imagine that most people might just get discouraged by the price tag, and give up on owning an HTPC case."z

"The 9550 is far from being a technological slouch though. While it may lack the raw pixel processing power of the Pro and XT series, it still has a 128-bit memory bus like the 9600 Pro and XT - in fact the 9550 is positioned between the 9600SE and the 9600Pro. While it definitely is not cutting edge, it should provide a healthy boost over DX7/DX8 video cards. This is an important step as it technically gives ATi a featureset that is nearly identical from the bottom up. This means that while games like Splinter Cell and Prince of Persia may not play as fast or at the same resolution of higher end cards, they will nonetheless play. The same cannot be said about the GF4MX series of cards."

"I'll say it right now. Most cases designed for HTPC use suck. All they are really, are standard desktop cases with fancy names. They are big, and will stand out in your Home Theatre setup right away. And unfortunately, most of the smaller HTPC cases have major limitations; they are usually designed with low-end mATX motherboards in mind, or worse, mITX. Good luck finding such a motherboard to build a system capable of any sort of decent caming on!"

That is all for me at the moment, I will see you back here in the AM :) - Cheers